Why I Hate My Best Short Story

The story is marked by a woman I met when she was forty years old and I was fifteen.

Illustration by Eleanor Taylor

Recently, while organizing a new collection of my short stories, I
revisited a work that I hadn’t read in many years: “If You Sing Like
That for Me,” which was first published in The Atlantic, in 1995, when
I was twenty-four years old. The story is told from the perspective of
an older Indian woman, Anita, who is looking back on the first few
months of her arranged marriage. Anita chronicles how, as a young bride,
she went from being initially scared of her husband, to suddenly falling
in love with him, briefly, before becoming alienated once again. “If You
Sing Like That for Me” is probably the best story I’ve ever written, and
certainly the most lauded. It’s also a story I’ve grown to hate.

I’ve grown to hate the story because I know how deeply it bears the mark
of the woman who inspired it—a woman I’ll call X. X was a family
acquaintance. I met her when she was forty years old and I was fifteen.
I’d grown up extremely isolated from the outside world, both because my
family were conservative Hindus and because my parents were taking care
of my older brother who was severely brain damaged, and the particular
horrors of his condition—the gastrointestinal tube, the nebulizer, the
urinary catheter and the infections it fermented—made me feel
desperately alone. When a person would visit our house, I would become
almost hysterical with excitement. I would follow the person from room
to room because when they were there, there was some relief from the
feeling of suffering unseen. X, I know now, was a deeply troubled person
in ways that most adults, and perhaps many children, would easily be
able to detect. But to my sheltered teen-age self she just seemed pretty
and soft-spoken.

X seduced me using the same steps that many adults use to seduce
children. First, there were long, lingering conversations about things
that X had little interest in, such as comics and science fiction
novels. Then there were trips, to school events or the mall, that she
offered to chaperone. And then, eventually, there was sex, which, to me,
was the most meaningful thing in the world. I was a child who felt
unloved, and to be touched and kissed made me feel that I mattered.

When her husband was travelling for work, X and I would talk on the
phone late at night for hours. My room was beside my parents’, and I
would lie in bed and whisper, which somehow made me breathless. When we
were together, we would stand facing each other and hold hands and
declare, “I marry you. I marry you. I marry you,” because X had heard
that Muslims could get married by saying that phrase three times. She
told me that the reason we’d first had sex was because I had looked at
her in such a forceful and passionate way that it seemed as if I was
demanding that we make love, and she had had no choice but to give in. I
know now that I was not capable at that age of seducing anyone with my
eyes, and that X’s comment served as a way of absolving her of
responsibility for our relationship. I was not the first underage person
she’d slept with. But at the time I believed her; I was flattered by the
idea that I could possess such a powerful charisma.

The premise of “If You Sing Like That for Me” derived from what I knew
about X’s unhappiness in her marriage, and in particular from something
she once told me during one of our late-night phone calls. She told me
that there was only one brief period when she had loved her husband as
much as she loved me. The first lines of the story go like this:

Late one June afternoon, seven months after my wedding, I woke from a
short deep sleep in love with my husband. I did not know then, lying
in bed and looking out the window at the line of gray clouds, that my
love would last only a few hours and that I would never again care for
Rajinder with the same urgency.

Through the character of Anita, I channelled X in other ways, too. X had
a way of injecting melodrama into ordinary interactions. If she began
chatting with someone in a grocery-store line, she would end the
conversation by saying, “Have a good life,” as if to emphasize the fact
that they were not likely to ever meet again. If she made a guess about
something and it turned out to be correct, she would say that she
believed she might have E.S.P. Anita has a similar way of loading
everyday experiences with meaning. The windows of her apartment have
metal grills in the shapes of tulips, which she describes as
“heavyhearted”; the excited cries of children playing on the street
sound to her like they’re compensating for a sense of loss. These
emotion-laden images, I think, help convey Anita’s fear and uncertainty
about her new marriage; her feelings are reflected in the world around
her. But when I read Anita’s voice today, I hear only X’s narcissism.

I began writing “If You Sing Like That for Me” when I was in college.
Around the same time, I began to see other women. X had encouraged me to
do so, perhaps as a way of telling herself that she was not interfering
with me being an ordinary young man. But when I told her that I was
sleeping with other people, she’d become angry and cry. I started to
feel burdened by our relationship and distressed as to what, exactly, X
expected from me. She often spoke about leaving her husband, but I had a
hard time imagining a life with her. I felt dishonest, and disloyal, for
continuing to say loving things to her. I knew that I wanted to be free.
Yet almost all of the other women I dated in college were much older
than I was, and almost all of them were married. On some level, in spite
of myself, I was seeking to replicate the drama that I had with X. I
only fully cut things off with her a few years after college, when I
began seeing someone closer to my age whom I liked enough to feel compelled to tell X that I could no longer be with her. Our affair had lasted for nearly a decade.

Last year, after a long time not seeing or speaking to her, X called me.
She said that she was sick with a terminal illness and wanted me to
know—that she didn’t want her death to surprise me. Perhaps a month or
two after this, she called again and said that the disease was not
showing up on test results. During this conversation, I had trouble
concealing the rage in my voice. Wanting to get off the phone, I told X
that I would call her back. When I still hadn’t a few days later, she
phoned once more. She said that she needed to know when I would call
because she was so nervous about my calling. Again I made up some excuse
to get off the phone. As we were hanging up, she said, “You know that I
am your friend, right?”

I’m surprised that, decades later, I am still so affected by her. In
general, I try not to think too much about my past. Yet I read “If You
Sing Like That for Me” now and I find myself jumping out of my skin.
After each paragraph, I have to get up from my desk and pace around.
Talking about the story, my tone becomes contemptuous. It is strange to
think that, to readers, this story means nothing like what it means to
me. It is strange, also, to think that I created Anita because I was at
one time in love with X, and that while the sympathy I extended to my
fictional character was worthwhile, the person who motivated it was
arguably undeserving of the same. But that is what it means to read and
write fiction.